"Oracle and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment."

I obviously (like many others) don't have infinitely deep pockets to run a small cluster of mainframes that Java needs to achieve those levels of performance that you're implying.

Oh, you are totally off from reality. I suggest you do some heavy catch up.

First of all, the new Stock Exchange systems are all trying to compete and be fastest in the world. The fastest, with the lowest latency, earns most money. There are billions of dollars involved and they want the best and fastest systems. And NASDAQ's are using, not C nor C++, but... Java! They can afford any amount of money or any investment, and they choose Java. Why is that, if Java is so slow? It isn't. Wrong of you.

Second, your example program with hash tables are not relevant for real servers. You have merely done a basic for loop, and try to extrapolate how a big server will perform. That is pure fail logic and wrong.

Third, NASDAQ runs their systems on Linux on x86 servers. Mainframes are DOG SLOW. Yes, they are. Wrong of you, again. Any modern high performant x86 cpu is 5-10 faster than the best IBM Mainframe cpu. Recently, IBM released their newest Z196 cpu, which runs at 5.5GHz and has ~250GB cache (L1 + L2 + L3 + L4) - check the specs. Yes, it is a quarter of a TB in cache!!! Ridiculous. And STILL, it performs as slow as a single core 2GHz Xeon cpu. Now THAT is bad and a waste of GHz and cache.

The Mainframe cpus are dog slow. You would use a Linux cluster on x86 instead. Here are three links:

The z10 is 50% faster than z9, and the z196 is 50% faster than z10, which means a z196 is 1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25 times faster than a z9. This means a z196 corresponds to 2.25 x 900MHz = 2 GHz Intel Xeon. But todays modern server x86 cpus have 8 cores, which means they have in total 8 cores x 2 GHz = 16 GHz. We see that x86 at 16GHz is plenty faster than z196 at 2GHz. This shows that a z196 is dog slow

Here is another independent source from a famous Linux expert that ported Linux to IBM Mainframe, who says 1MIPS == 4MHz x86. http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-390@vm.marist.edu/msg18587.html
This shows that a z196 which has 1400 MIPS corresponds to 5,6GHz x86. But a modern x86 has 8 cores, that means it has in total 16GHz, which is 3x faster than 5.6GHz. Again, we see that the Mainframe is dog slow.

Here is another link where the cofounder of TurboHercules says that a 8-way Nehalem-EX gives 3.200 MIPS using software emulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboHercules#Performance
But software emulation is 5-10x slower. This means a 8-way Nehalem-EX running native code should be 5-10x faster, that is, 16.000 - 32.000MIPS. This big MIPS number matches a fully equipped z196 mainframe with 64 cpus. Again, we see that the Mainframe is dog slow.

In short, an 8-way Intel Nehalem-EX PC will be as fast as the biggest IBM Mainframe with 64 cpus, in terms of cpu performance. Of course the Mainframe has higher throughput, but the Mainframe latency sucks. No exchange uses Mainframes.